Fan Base Forms Around Worst Movie Ever

May 6, 2010— -- George Hardy is a small town Alabama dentist with a secret past.

Along with other aspiring actors, Hardy starred in the 1989 horror movie "Troll 2" -- a low-budget flick that holds a place in history as perhaps the worst movie ever made.

"I was just having fun. I just thought, 'What the heck, I'll be in a movie for the experience of it. I probably will never get another experience like this again,'" said Hardy, now 55. "We were just trying to make a good movie."

But they failed miserably. And failure doesn't really begin to describe it. "Troll 2" skipped theaters and became a cheesy staple of late night HBO. At one point, it was voted the worst film ever on the website IMDB.com, and the movie review site Rottentomatoes.com gave it a zero -- the lowest score possible.

Then there's the plot, which has nothing to do with 1986's "Troll." In fact, there's not a single troll in the movie. It's about a little boy, Joshua Waits, who is terrorized by vegetarian goblins who want to turn his family into plants and eat them.

"I thought that I was going to be a movie star. I thought that this was the next 'Gremlins' or the next 'Labyrinth,'" said Michael Paul Stephenson, who played Joshua Waits. "We put the VHS in and we all sat around the TV, and seven seconds in, my dad's jaw dropped and he said, 'Oh, Michael, this is a terrible movie.'"

Two decades later, audiences seem to think that "Troll 2" is so terrible, it's actually good. A rabid fan base has formed around the hilarious horror movie and theaters from Austin to Los Angeles are hosting special screenings to sold-out audiences.

"All of a sudden I had just about every major theater in the country contacting me, saying, 'We have all these "Troll 2" fans too,' and it set off all these screenings everywhere," said Stephenson. "And aside from the big screenings there were screenings happening in kids' basements everywhere."